Choral Counting Tool

Due to technology changes, Stenhouse has retired the Choral Counting tool. We apologize for this inconvenience and have provided some additional resources below that we hope you find useful.

Choral Counting & Counting Collections by Megan L. Franke, Elham Kazemi, and Angela Chan Turrou inspires preschool and elementary teachers to experience the joys and rewards of using two activities – Choral Counting and Counting Collections – regularly in their classrooms and in their partnerships with families.

What's Choral Counting?

Choral Counting is a fun, engaging instructional activity designed to leverage children’s mathematical thinking as they work together to count and dig into a variety of number sequences. It starts with a teacher facilitating a group of students to count aloud together while she records the number sequence in a purposeful organization. Then, the teacher invites students to think about what they notice about the numbers; the teacher facilitates a conversation that builds on student ideas and supports students to reason about the mathematics as they engage with each other’s ideas.

The counting sequence might be one that students are familiar with, such as counting by 5 starting at 5, or it might be one that keeps students on their toes, such as counting by 5, starting at 11. At times the count might be a fraction or decimal count, one that goes backwards (maybe even into the negatives), or a regular count by ones, but starting somewhere like 990.

Trying Choral Counting in Your Classroom

As teachers and students engage in Choral Counting together, they often get quite intrigued by what they are seeing in the numbers and begin to wonder which patterns might arise, where regularities might repeat, and why certain things are happening. The ongoing thinking and conversations propel teachers to engage students in this activity over and over, finding new ways to adapt and innovate based on what students are exploring. 

While the Stenhouse choral counting tool was retired in 2023 due to technology changes, other online Choral Counting Planners such as this one from Creative Maths might be helpful: https://creativemaths.net/ccp/

You could also use the planning templates available in Appendices 1 and 2 of the Choral Counting and Counting Collections, which you can find in the "Resources" section of the Choral Counting Product Page.

• What do you want to count by?
• Where do you want to start?
• Do you want the sequence to progress across the row or down a column?  
• How many numbers do you want in that row or column?  
• What would happen if you increased the number of rows?
• Are you interested in trying something totally new, like a fractions count?  
• Do you think improper fractions or mixed numbers is the way to go?

The list of questions continues, and we invite teachers to ask yourselves questions like these as you play around with a variety of counting sequences. As you test out new ideas, think about how you might try it with your students and what might happen.

Let yourself (and your students!) get intrigued by the many different ways we might engage in Choral Counting together.